The Art of Empathy (28 page)

HOW TO RESOURCE YOURSELF

At any time of the day or night, no matter where you are or what's going on, there are places in your body that feel strong, stable, capable, and resourceful. Even if you're in pain and even when you're dealing with extreme difficulties, there are strong, calm areas in your body that you can access intentionally. Let's try this now.

Sit quietly. With your eyes open or closed, use your Einfühlung capacity to feel into the words
strong, stable,
and
resourceful.
Locate an area in your body that feels this way right now. This can be a large area, like your abdomen or your thighs, or a small area, like your left foot or the upper part of your right arm. Where does this feeling reside in your body in this moment?
Right now, where do you feel strong, stable, and resourceful? Focus on this area and breathe deeply as you feel into this innate and effortless sense of strength and stability that already exists inside you. Use your intrapersonal skills to empathically interact with this area and with these qualities. They belong to you. They're available to you at any time and in any situation. This is resourcing. It's very simple, and yet it's nearly revolutionary, because very few of us ever learned how to connect to the preexisting strength, calm, and resourcefulness that exist inside our own bodies.

I learned how to resource myself in only the past few years, and I notice that it's sort of the opposite of how I used to behave around pain and trouble. In the past, the pain and trouble would pull all of my attention, and I'd focus everything on it. There's a way that pain and trouble can sort of dampen or silence the parts of you that feel fine, strong, and resourceful; in the presence of pain and trouble, it's easy to hyperfocus on difficulties and lose your awareness of the fact that you also have sources of comfort inside you that are fully accessible, right now.

With resourcing, you can learn how to pay attention to more than one thing. So, if you have a horrible headache, you use resourcing not to pretend that your headache is gone, but to open up your focus to include the comfort that exists in, for instance, your arm or your knee. Or if you're dealing with intense emotional upheaval, you can focus inside yourself and find an area in your body that feels stable and grounded right now. You aren't repressing the upheaval with this practice; rather, you are opening up your focus to also include the physical sense of stability that exists inside you during upheavals.

When you're in a social situation filled with emotional trouble that you can't read, or if you feel yourself being dragged into hyperempathy or runaway healing behaviors, you can quickly focus inside yourself and locate an area in your body where you feel grounded, resourceful, and stable. The point with resourcing isn't to repress the fact of what you're experiencing. Instead, resourcing helps you connect to another set of facts, which are that more than one thing is going on and that you always have the resources you need to address and deal with whatever confronts you.

I've found in my own life that resourcing is a workable and healthy replacement for compulsive orthorexia. Instead of applying extreme discipline to my eating in order to enforce structure, I simply locate sources of
structure within myself. Resourcing is a wonderful self-soothing behavior that can and does coexist with difficulties. It can also help you learn that one condition doesn't erase the other. Resourcing can help you open your focus to
include
trouble and difficulties in the full-bodied narrative of your whole life, rather than hyperfocusing on the troubles and losing your perspective and your skills. Resourcing is a wonderful way to unvalence your inner world.

Resourcing is naturally grounding and focusing, and it helps you set internal boundaries around emotional and social stimuli. With resourcing, you can feel a very strong emotion,
and
you can sense the calm groundedness of, for instance, your calves. Or you can have a headache
and
feel the flexibility, ease, and gracefulness in your right hand. Or, when you're in the presence of someone who's in emotional turmoil, you can experience intense Emotion Contagion,
and
you can connect to internal sources of grounding, peace, and stability. Resourcing gives you ways to clearly identify difficulties
and
clearly identify your extensive internal resources at the exact same time.

Resourcing is also a wonderful practice to use when you're unable to sleep. Instead of struggling to clear your mind or fretting about how you really need to get some sleep, resourcing can help you locate the areas of your body that are tired and ready to sleep. You can feel your bed underneath you and let yourself sink into your mattress. Even if you don't immediately fall into sleep, resourcing is a wonderful way to achieve relaxation during sleepless periods. Resourcing helps you open up your focus, and at the same time, it helps you create a kind of boundary or threshold between your difficulties and your resourcefulness. Resourcing can help you learn to identify multiple internal states and to transition gracefully between them, which will help you create and maintain a healthy terrarium environment for your empathic self, even when you're not at home. Resourcing can help your body become a portable support system for your empathic awareness—an empathic sanctuary that's available wherever you go. The skill of
thresholding
can help you in a similar way.

LEARNING TO CREATE THRESHOLDS

Defining Boundaries, which you learned about in the previous chapter, helps you create a kind of threshold between yourself and others, between your emotions and the emotions of others, and between your ideas, attitudes, and behaviors and those of others. Establishing your boundaries is an imaginal way to create a sense of privacy and sacred space around yourself so that you'll
have the internal security, self-awareness, and emotional flexibility you need to empathize skillfully.

In this chapter, we've been expanding that sense of sacred space to include your home and your most intimate surroundings. As we move forward, we'll work to create a sense of boundaries for you in many different environments and situations. For instance, on my website, an actor posed a question about finding ways to access different internal states quickly, and it really got me thinking. This is an excerpt of the question:
⁴⁵

One of my biggest struggles, though, is how to make the transitions between situations in which it is not safe to be my fully emotional and empathic self (e.g., many business environments) and situations in which I am in a safe place (e.g., with a close friend) or in which I need to tap into my emotions fully (e.g., as an actor).

I immediately thought of the
threshold,
which is a clear physical or behavioral boundary between one thing and another. For instance, a physical threshold at a door tells you that you're moving from one space into another, while a behavioral threshold (such as becoming silent before saying a prayer) tells you that you're moving from one behavior to another. Thresholding of one kind or another is an important part of almost any ritual you can name. A threshold tells you that you're entering into a new space (think of ornate church doors), a new attitude (think of removing your shoes when you enter a Buddhist's home), or a new position (think of the aisle in a wedding, where the wedding party walks in a deliberate cadence toward the threshold of the altar). Even when you're not consciously aware of them, thresholds tell some part of you that a change in behavior, demeanor, or position is required.

I view our threshold awareness as an empathic skill, and I'd say that we all have it, to some degree. Therefore, when I need to be in an area where emotional awareness is low to nonexistent, I create thresholds and physical boundaries around myself, as if to say, “Yeah, there's disorder or emotional trouble all around me, but inside my area, there's order, calm, emotional awareness, and freedom.” Thresholding is a physical form of setting my boundaries, but it's also a part of my resourcing practice, because it helps me find sources of calm and freedom within myself—especially when those things are not available in the external environment.

So, for instance, if I'm working in a cubicle (for some reason, writers are often put into cubicles in noisy rooms,
sigh),
I might create a threshold by posting funny or beautiful pictures at the entryway, so that anyone coming in will get a sense that they're entering a new area where new behavior is required. I set more thresholds by making sure my cubicle is orderly and appealing. Then I set a behavioral threshold around myself with the respectful and appropriate use of the gifts of anger and shame. (I set clear behavioral boundaries for myself and others without violence.) When I create good thresholds, my area sets boundaries
for
me so that I don't have to work so hard fending off unaware people and their random demands. Through thresholding, my personal workspace seems to tell people that this is not a place for shenanigans or disruptive behavior. Thresholds are awesome.

You can also use thresholding at home if your living space is not yet supportive enough, quiet enough, or spacious enough for your specific needs. Even if you only have a small room in a shared home, you can use your artistic and spatial skills to create beautiful thresholds that announce that yours is a private and unique space and that a new kind of behavior is required within.

FRONT STAGE, BACKSTAGE, AND THRESHOLDING

If you want to see a world where thresholds are central to just about everything, focus your Einfühlung capacities on live theater, which is where professional specialists in empathy and Emotion Contagion (actors!) work. In live theater, there's a distinct separation between backstage (where you can slump over and read a book when you're not in a scene) and front stage (where you have to bring all of your skills, project your voice, engage all parts of your self, and become someone new). When you cross the threshold from backstage to front stage, you're actually supposed to become a new person.

Yet the act of thresholding doesn't stop once you get onstage. There are unseen, but very real, thresholds between upstage and downstage, and between stage left and stage right. There's also a strong threshold between the audience and the front apron of the stage itself. In a traditional theater, there's another threshold, called the
proscenium arch
(usually, the curtains are a part of the proscenium), which delineates the stage proper from the front apron of the stage (where actors might come to break the fourth wall of the stage and intentionally break a threshold to interact with the audience).

Although I don't think it's entirely conscious, the theater world as an entity understands that intensive, multilayered thresholding allows actors to access
the amazing behavioral, empathic, emotional, physical, gestural, and subtextual changes they must undergo in their work. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that without thresholding, live theater could not have evolved.

As you think about thresholds, remember that they don't have to be large or obvious. For instance, some actors can switch personae simply by changing their clothing or their posture. Many athletes use a portable sort of thresholding, which anthropologists call
fetishes
—for instance, a lucky hat, a lucky pair of shoes, a specific preperformance meal or ritual, and so forth. These things can help a performer cross the threshold and make the behavioral leap from regular life to full-blown performance mode. In a way, these fetishes are make-believe tools, but in another way, they're a potent imaginal signal to the performer inside that person:
Regular life with all its distractions is now fading away, and I must now be intensely focused and at the absolute peak of my abilities.

Many performers create entire personae that can act as fetishes and thresholds. For instance, the singer Beyoncé, who's a shy and quiet person in her real life, created a performance persona named Sasha Fierce. Sasha, the world-class performer, is a fetish and a threshold for Beyoncé, the person, and she's brilliant. So this imaginal process truly works.

As you travel through the emotional landscape of modern life, play with the idea of thresholds, personae, and fetishes. Skillful and subtle thresholding can help you signal to yourself—and to others—that no matter what's happening on that side of the room or with those people over there,
you
have a private, protected, sacred space in which to feel your emotions, understand the emotions of others, engage in skilled empathy, perform at the top of your game, and access your intrapersonal skills and resources at the same time.

As you become more comfortable and skillful with the six aspects of empathy, you can also use thresholding with your empathic skills so that you can have some privacy in social interactions. If you look back at my scene with Joseph and Iris in
Chapter 1
, you'll see me thresholding when Iris looks over at me, and you'll see the place where I could have actively entered into their interaction. Right before Iris dropped into a submissive gesture in response to Joseph's shock and anger, I was preparing to stand up and don a more outwardly empathic persona (if things had gone sour). But Joseph and Iris handled everything beautifully, so there was no need for me to move into that persona. Thresholding gives me options.